


nostalgia bittersweet as honey

by zombeesknees



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 09:55:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16931088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombeesknees/pseuds/zombeesknees
Summary: Of bees and fields and memory. | Written many moons ago on LJ.





	nostalgia bittersweet as honey

“Just outside of Normandy, 1938,” the Doctor said, breathing in deeply, savoring the scents of wildflowers and summer and a time that had died. 

“Why here, Doctor?” Her hair was braided, and she wore a skirt the hue of the buttercups nodding around their feet. Her form-fitting blouse was laced tightly across her breasts—he found himself staring more than usual. The wind ran its fingers through the wispy pale strands of hair that had pulled free of her braid, insistently plucked at the folds of her skirt, and did its best to untie the white lacings of her shirt. The Doctor was illogically jealous.

“I’m feeling nostalgic today,” he said, pulling his eyes away from the human girl glittering in the sunbeams. “This is the last summer this field will ever be so beautiful. The Germans come, with their tanks and their mortar shells, and destroy all of this.”

“That’s terrible,” Rose said, and he could hear the regret in her voice. Oh, Rose Tyler. How she understood. 

“But I really brought us here for a picnic,” the Doctor said with an exaggerated smile. “A day off, just the two of us and several thousand flowers and bumblebees.” 

And she smiled to match his, picked up the wicker basket, and ran through the flowers.

He was more than happy to give chase.

 

\---

 

They had chicken salad sandwiches and honey-covered apple slices for their picnic, with ice-cold lemonade. The Doctor tasted a hint of vodka, and gave Rose a slightly disapproving glance for spiking their innocent drinks, but she just smiled over the edge of her glass. 

She plucked clovers and daisies and violets and wove them into flower crowns while he lay stretched out on his back on the checkered blanket, staring up at the clouds scudding gently across the patchwork blue sky. He rambled for a while, about the difference between cumulus and cirrus and how that one, right _there_ , looked incredibly like a Box Whorten, see the tentacles? She hummed under her breath, a song they’d heard at Woodstock last week. When he pushed himself up on his elbows to look at the horizon, she leaned over and slipped the flower crown she’d just finished over his wind-tousled hair. 

He adjusted it slightly, smiling at her with half-lidded eyes. She’d added buttercups and bluebells to her crown, and as the wind picked up and mussed her braid she became a free-spirited flower child from the Sixties. A sunburn was beginning across her shoulders, had darkened her cheeks, and he thought about running back to the TARDIS for a tube of SPF 45. But that would spoil the moment, break the charm of the dancing flowers and the fat, drowsy bees that bumbled across their cast-off plates in search of honey.

Instead he stretched his hand towards her, brushed back the strands of hair, traced the lines of her cheekbones with his fingertips. And when she leaned in closer, he pressed his lips to hers, tasted the apple and honey that clung to her tongue. 

He found that the wind never would have succeeded with the laces of her top — that even his deft fingers had some degree of trouble with the last knot. And that there was a reason why her blouse had been so tightly laced.

“You minx,” he whispered in her ear as he slid his hands over her bared curves.

“What if someone—” she gasped.

“No one will interrupt us.”

“I hate it when you see the words in my head before I even say—” But his hands took the rest of the breath from her lungs before she could finish, and all they could focus on then was pulling off the clothes that separated their bodies.

He’d seen stars go supernova, wiping out entire galaxies. He’d flown away from black holes and watched planets crack in half and tasted the universe in every slice of time. He’d stood at the edge of the Medusa Cascade and stared into the Untempered Schism. And yet of all of that, _none of it_ , could prepare him for the overwhelming experience of making love with Rose Tyler. Fixed, unchangeable points were few and far between in the universe, and every time with Rose was so shockingly different that he sometimes wondered if _anything_ in the universe could be inflexible.

When she arched her back with a gasp, bringing their bodies even closer, he could feel the entire planet spinning beneath them, the thrum of the grass growing and the insects burrowing in the earth, and it took his breath away so sharply he felt a stab of pain. 

There was a moment, a fraction of a second, when Rose could feel the rest of the world—no, the entire _universe_ —in all of its great and terrible beauty and she wondered if she could have handled such a sensation if she hadn’t been the Bad Wolf. Being with a Time Lord was intense beyond the definition of the word; there was no way any other human man could possibly compare, and she spared another fraction of a second to wonder if that was a good or bad thing.

But then he moved against her, inside her, and her thoughts scattered like the bees in the wind as she cried out. And as her hand clenched and pulled his hair, he barely felt the inconsequential pain, only the shudder they shared and the wind against their sweat-slicked skin. 

He looked down at her from centimeters away, memorizing the shape of her mouth and the flecks of gold in her eyes, even as she counted the freckles across his nose and distracted him by flexing her fingers in the hair that curled slightly against his neck. She was soft beneath him and the sun was hot above him and he couldn’t remember a time of more contentment. A buttercup had weaved itself in her hair.

“We broke your flower crown,” Rose said finally, her voice shaking with emotion and exertion. 

“You can make me another,” he murmured, kissing the hollow of her throat. 

But she didn’t—they lost the time and the day in each other and when they finally dressed, Rose helping him with his tie and the Doctor helping her with her blouse, they stretched out to look up at the stars, pristine and clear away from city lights and pollution. He told her their names, and she savored the warmth of his chest beneath her cheek, tangled her legs with his, drifted into a peaceful dream of singing bumblebees and dancing flowers.

Later, he carried her back to the TARDIS and to his bed. He smiled at her as she slept, her fingers curled and a smile on her face, and thought that the field in Normandy would never see such love again.

 

\---

 

He would always think of Rose when he tasted honey on his lips. Every time he saw a buttercup.


End file.
